Thursday 24 April 2014

The Crooked Brothers - Postcard EP

In this golden age of DIY music, artists are forever coming up with ingenuous ways of getting their sound out to both new and established audiences. The latest venture by Canadian trio The Crooked Brothers is based around blending the visual artistic talents of band member Jesse Matas and a self-gratifying desire to preserve the timeless and under threat postal system in their homeland.

However with keeping a foot on either side of the communication timeline, the band have launched three new songs which are primarily being made available by a limited edition of re-usable postcard downloads. The spirit is in posting the card on to a new user and thus spreading the content of some very good old time roots music laced with authentic instrumentation and delectable harmonies.

Each limited design postcard, featuring art originating from within the band and across Canada, has a restricted print run of 100 but rest assured a popular download site is making the tunes accessible in a more technological friendly format. The track earmarked for promotion is the breezy ‘There Ain’t No One’, which the ‘brothers’ imply is their inaugural happy track, and a song driven along by harmonica. Elsewhere the song writing threesome of Darwin Baker, Matt Foster and the previously mentioned Jesse Mata, interchange banjo, mandolin, guitars and Dobro with perhaps the EP’s most heart-warming track being the sublime back porch number ‘I Think I Need To Be Alone’. The final track, where the guys revert to their sad song comfort zone, possesses possibly the strongest chorus line of the three with ‘If I Had Known’ also having a more rootsy live feel to its sound.

With two full length albums behind them, POSTCARD EP is surely a bridging interlude to more timeless offerings from The Crooked Brothers who will use the release to support a handful of UK dates in May. At present there seems to be a bias of female Canadian artists flowing into the UK on the traditional roots bandwagon so a touch of gender balance is welcome especially with the substantial talents on show of The Crooked Brothers. There is also the prospect of your local postman personally delivering the postcard download, which will keep one group of Canadian artists happy. 

www.crookedbrothers.com